So, obviously, I’ve been getting familiar with WordPress after moving from a hosted solution running ExpressionEngine. And, I have some thoughts and observations.
Monthly Archives: January 2010
Moving – Part 5
Well, I finally switched the DNS for the georgekrueger.com domain over so it would point here. In fact if you’re reading this right now, you’re doing it at that address.
The only problem right now is, it appears the DNS is not fully propogated. What that means is that some people will still be sent to the old website. That’s not that big of a deal, but unfortunately since I set georgekrueger.com as the “primary” domain in the WordPress settings, some people trying to come via chitowngeorge.wordpress.com will actually be sent to the old website.
Oops. I guess I should have waited for DNS to fully propogate before setting it as the primary.
Oh, well. It should straighten itself out in a few hours. Until then, if I want to post anything I’ll have to do it from my iPhone, since the DNS server at work is still sending me to the old site.
More Thoughts on the iPad
And, when I say more thoughts, I mean other people’s thoughts. My last post about it may seem like I think its going to bomb or that I don’t see the market for it. But, that’s not true. I think I’m just more disappointed in what it’s not than appreciative of what it is.
So, what is it, then? Well, Gizmodo and Daring Fireball both describe their take on what it is, and more importantly, what it means for Apple:
Gizmodo – The iPad is the Gadget We Never Knew We Needed
Daring Fireball – The iPad Big Picture
(I still hate the name though, but I’m getting used to hearing. I guess, eventually, it’ll sound as normal as “iPod” does now.)
Moving – Part 4
Well, I got the Call it Karma and Posters pages up to date. I don’t have as much flexibility here as I did with a hosted site running ExpressionEngine, but it gets the job done.
The only thing left now is to forward the georgekrueger.com domain so it points here. I may wait until tomorrow, to give some of the people connected to the RSS feed a change to update their links.
iPad? Color me less than impressed
I found today’s unveiling of the iPad to be a little underwhelming. It’s basically just an iPod Touch with a larger screen.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it will sell well. I’m sure developers will come up with some great new apps (especially games) to take advantage of the larger screen.
I just don’t see any need to rush out and get one any time soon.
Also, the iPad? Really!? (Where’s Seth and Amy when I need them?)
Moving – Part 3, Housecleaning
Well, I had to go through all of the old posts that linked to other posts and fix the links. Again, pain in the ass.
Didn’t I learn anything the last time I moved? (Which was less than a year ago, btw.) At least that was only changing the domain name, but I still remember going through old posts to cleaning up links.
I still need to go through and clean up the posts that point to the old Call it Karma sub-domain. I’ll have to create a CiK page here to link to first.
I also need to re-create the Posters page (a number of posts link to that, as well). That one’s going to be the really big pain.
All I know is, it’s going to be a very long time before I move again!
Moving – Part 2
So, after importing all of the old posts into WordPress, a quick look through some of the posts made me realize something bad. All of the posts with pictures in them pointed to a files hosted on the old site. (Apart from posts containing pictures hosted on Flickr.)
That’s not good.
So, I had to download all of the pictures (via ftp, since there was no way to just go to the directory where they were contained) and upload them to WP. Then I had to edit each individual post containing one of these pictures to link them to the ones I just uploaded.
What a pain in the ass. I still need to go through the posts and find all of the ones that point to anything hosted on the old server that’s separate from ExpressionEngine.
Pain in the ass.
Moving – Part 1
In order to save on hosting costs, I’ve decided to move this blog to WordPress. The first step was exporting the old entries from ExpressionEngine so that I could import them here. (After, obviously, setting up an account on WordPress.)
This was not very straight forward, since there doesn’t seem to be an export option or plugin for ExpressionEngine to do this automatically. However, following the directions here, I was able to do it with very little trouble.
There is one caveat, though, if you are trying to follow these directions. For Step 3 it says “Click on “View” for the “index” template of the ‘export’ Template Group”, this is wrong. In the Template Management screen I kept clicking the “View” link next to the template. You need to go into the template itself and then click “View Rendered Template” to get this to work.
Once I figured that out, it worked like a charm.
The next step will be to forward the georgekrueger.com domain here, finally followed by moving the domain registry (just to keep things simple and all in one place).
The Original Apple Tablet
With all of the hype surrounding whatever it is Apple is planning on announcing next week, Gizmodo takes an in-depth look at the somewhat tragic history of the original Apple tablet, and device that started the whole PDA market to begin with, the Newton.
It’s a bit of a long read, but very interesting, especially if you happen to find computer history, not to mention the history of Apple, interesting.
Why I switched back to Firefox from Chrome
I’ve been using Chrome as my default Windows browser since it was in Beta. Today, I finally switched my default browser back to Firefox. This comes after about a week of using both. After continually waiting for a site to open in Chrome, then switching to Firefox and have the same site come up while Chrome was still trying, I just gave up.
When I first started using Chrome, I loved it. It was fast, it renders pages almost as well as Safari does, and it has a lot of nice features. But, as time wore on, Chrome started getting slower and slower.
Sure, I tried emptying the cache, download history and whatnot. That helped at first, but it wouldn’t take too long for Chrome to slow down again. After a while, it didn’t help at all.
So what’s going on? Why is Chrome slowing down? I think it’s simple, really. If you use Chrome, open the options and try to set how many days of browsing history to remember. Go on, I’ll wait.
Can’t find it, can you? There is no setting to tell it how far back to remember. Basically, Chrome remembers your entire browsing history, until you manually delete it. And then, your only options are to delete only the recent history (up to four months), or everything. This is exactly backwards. I’d much rather keep my recent history, and delete everything older than, let’s say, a month.
I went ahead and deleted the entire history, and guess what? Chrome much faster now. But, I find this an unacceptable solution. Having a recent history aids in browsing sites I routinely visit, and quickly finding things I’ve recently looked at. The only choice with Chrome is all or nothing. That’s too bad.
The other problem that I’ve run into is that Chrome is just is not as stable as Firefox. I’ve had it lock up on me too many times. And, although Chrome opens each tab as a separate process, so that one locked tab theoretically won’t effect other open tabs, this doesn’t seem to work so well. What I’ve found is that, if and when a tab does freeze, you can’t actually switch to any of the other tabs. So, while it’s well and great that the processes in the other tabs weren’t effected, it really does me no good if I can’t switch to them, because the tab I’m looking at is frozen and won’t let me close it or switch away from it.
Yes, I know I could kill the tab with the built in process manager, but a) that doesn’t always work, and b) most people probably don’t even know that’s there, or how to even get to it.
Having said all that, I haven’t made up my mind 100% just yet. I’m going to put on Firefox for a while, and see if it still fits. But, the one thing I really love about Chrome is the “Application shortcuts” feature (which is basically a site-specific browser). I’ve used that for my email and for the web-based help desk system we use at work.
Maybe in the end I’ll wind up running two browsers at once, Firefox for general web surfing, and Chrome for the SSBs.
